AWS Brings M1 Mac Minis To Its Cloud (techcrunch.com) 25
At today's AWS re:Invent keynote, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced that AWS will now offer M1 Mac minis as part of its EC2 compute service. From a report: It was only last year, that AWS first brought Mac minis to its cloud. Using the Thunderbolt port, these minis connect to the AWS Nitro System, which helps make them available in the EC2 cloud, just like any other instance. The minis used here are the standard M1 8 core machines with 16 GiB of memory. The new instances will be available in two regions (US West - Oregon and US East - North Virginia) for $0.6498 per hour, with support for discounts through AWS' Savings Plans, too. AWS promises that these new machines offer a "60% better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads."
467.85 / month (Score:2)
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what is apples cut of that? (Score:2)
what is apples cut of that?
Re: what is apples cut of that? (Score:2)
Nothing.
Apple gets paid when Amazon buys the hardware from Apple.
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Re:467.85 / month (Score:5, Informative)
At $467.85 / month
But a 10 minute build job every day for a month only costs $3.25. So if you are generating automated builds, it has significant value. Guess this is one of those "get the right tool for the right job" sort of situations.
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Re:467.85 / month (Score:4, Informative)
Apple only will allow MacOS to be licensed in minimums of 24 hours for both the software and hardware.
. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services.
A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a âoeLesseeâ) provided that all of the following conditions are met:
(i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License;
(ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
(iii) during the lease period, the End User Lessee must have sole and exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware on which it is installed, except that you, as the party leasing the Apple Software (âoeLessorâ), may provide administrative support for the Apple Software; and
(iv) prior to using the Apple Software, the End User Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms applicable to any software preinstalled on the Apple Software, including, but not limited to Appleâ(TM)s Xcode developer software and any other Apple or third-party software
https://www.apple.com/legal/sl... [apple.com]
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And I was one of the ones who pushed Amazon to update their blogs and support docs.
It used to have no asterisk or anything on it. "Pay for just what you need!" and then the first day spun up and down Mac Minis like 20 times and ended up with a massive bill which they refunded because I screenshotted every place on their site that made no mention. It's a sneaky scam that they're better now about highlighting. Also fuck Apple for requiring that. Every online Mac now has a 1 day minimum.
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And I was one of the ones who pushed Amazon to update their blogs and support docs.
It used to have no asterisk or anything on it. "Pay for just what you need!" and then the first day spun up and down Mac Minis like 20 times and ended up with a massive bill which they refunded because I screenshotted every place on their site that made no mention. It's a sneaky scam that they're better now about highlighting. Also fuck Apple for requiring that. Every online Mac now has a 1 day minimum.
They want to sell Macs to Developers; they would go broke (not really; but) if each $700 Mac mini (which I think is likely about Apple's lowest-profit product) sold to Amazon (once every ? Years) was shared by 1,000 Developers just doing 5 minute XCode builds.
It's a little-bit dickish; but if they didn't do something like this, very few "moonlighting" Android Devs. would ever buy a Mac to do iOS Development.
And as Apple has repeatedly stated, they are primarily a Hardware Company.
But they are already sticki
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If it's a Mac shop, and they're only doing one turn a day, why bother pushing it to the cloud?
Even if it's only three bucks, and it's maybe twice as fast, they wouldn't have a machine
available for 20 minutes for a daily build? Are they testing in the cloud too, running screen share,
or are they relying on unit tests and beta releases to catch every problem?
A refurb Mac mini from Apple is less than $600. Any shop that is putting out a product that would
take 30 minutes to build, but won't spend $600 on a dedic
Where do you put it? (Score:1)
A refurb Mac mini from Apple is less than $600. Any shop that is putting out a product that would
take 30 minutes to build, but won't spend $600 on a dedicated mini seems misguided at best
I work at a small company, all remote. We used hosted services (like AWS) for everything, so we have no data centers...
Just where do you suggest we put a Mac mini, so that everyone can make use of it?
What happens if the cheap refry breaks? We all just sit around until we can find another one?
There is a lot of value in jus
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A refurb Mac mini from Apple is less than $600. Any shop that is putting out a product that would
take 30 minutes to build, but won't spend $600 on a dedicated mini seems misguided at best
I work at a small company, all remote. We used hosted services (like AWS) for everything, so we have no data centers...
Just where do you suggest we put a Mac mini, so that everyone can make use of it?
What happens if the cheap refry breaks? We all just sit around until we can find another one?
There is a lot of value in just using an Amazon hosted Mac mini. The costs and pricing structure are kind of out of wack but it's still more viable for us than buying a Mac mini and figuring out just where to put it and how to manage it.
For your particular use-case, it probably makes sense. But how common do you honestly think your (non) IT model really is?
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For your particular use-case, it probably makes sense. But how common do you honestly think your (non) IT model really is?
I've worked for a lot of small to medium sized companies. I would say in fact this is incredibly common.
Even in a place that has a real IT department, just what do you think will happen if you hand them an M1 Mac mini? You are in for a fight as most of them will want nothing at all to do with a one-off, much less some bargain bin castoff.
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For your particular use-case, it probably makes sense. But how common do you honestly think your (non) IT model really is?
I've worked for a lot of small to medium sized companies. I would say in fact this is incredibly common.
Even in a place that has a real IT department, just what do you think will happen if you hand them an M1 Mac mini? You are in for a fight as most of them will want nothing at all to do with a one-off, much less some bargain bin castoff.
I have worked in various places as a Software/Hardware Embedded Dev. and also in other lives as a Windows ERP Application Dev. Exclusively for small shops. In fact, the last place I worked as a Windows App Dev. (Shudder) was literally a Mom and Pop operation. These places were small enough that I generally handled at least some of the IT duties as well as my regular Dev. job duties.
All of those companies still had their own File Servers, with Dev/Building done on one's own Desktop/Laptop. I would expect tha
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They probably build and test for dozens of hardware (iPads/iPhones) and iOS versions and run similar7the same tests on them.
That is on a single Mac in the corner quite time consuming as you can only GUI test one device at a time.
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Makes you wonder, since a Mac Mini itself isn't that expensive. I can see it being useful if you need a cluster of them for say, a day every year, but any more and having it on premises might not be all that much more expensive.
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Most AWS customers are not very price sensitive.
My current cloud infrastructure would cost 40x on AWS. I watch for good deals from indy hosting providers, lock them in for at least a year, and handle my own orchestration. Sometimes I have to fiddle with initramfs scripts manually to get everything properly encrypted and many people don't want to bother.
AWS is tremendously profitable and they handle much of the legwork for you plus provide support. My vendors will take a ticket on a hardware outage but that
Not enough RAM for anything useful (Score:3)
Same problem with the normal release of such hardware; it needs more RAM to do useful things. This will be more interesting when they start offering 32G and 64G configurations.
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haha, sounds like another flop. people don't want to even buy M1 hardware to develop on, so they just rent it from amazon.
hahahaha. Apple's going to end up like the east india company in our lifetimes if this keeps going on. "huh, what's apple?"
Remember, they, like the EIC, used slave labour at one point, and in some cases, still do.
Wow, it's been a couple of years since I've seen that old familiar "Apple is Doomed! Doomed I tells ya!" Trope. Nice to see ya!
Apple could close its production down today, keep on paying its employees, rental space, etc. and likely still survive a few decades.
Apple, Inc: Proudly going out of business every single year since 1976!